Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
siberian_shamanism is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lavender_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
asbestos_safety_shoes is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hge is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
loyola_university_chicago_school_of_law is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
half_moon_pond is a lake in the state or province maine	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
andrew_jacobs is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
emi has acquired eric_nicoli	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
isiah_thomas plays in the league nba	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
beijing is a subpart of china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8